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The stakes were unusually high for President Joe Biden in his 2024 State of the Union address. Most Americans thought he was too old to run for a second term, but Biden was dead set on doing so. The annual set piece before a joint session of Congress in early March of that year offered him an opportunity—a requirement, really—to show that he was capable of doing the job for another four years.

Biden’s team got the headlines they wanted, with his hour-plus speech being described as “feisty,” “fiery,” “energetic” and “impassioned,” “rowdy and shouty.” It was all of those things. But as someone who was in the chamber for that speech, those affects papered over a frequent incomprehensibility. He skipped over and slurred words as he tried to maintain an artificially quick tempo. It was difficult from my seat in the press gallery to make out much of what he was saying.

Biden hadn’t become a younger man overnight, but he gave enough of a performance of energy to temporarily contain Democratic murmurs about his standing for reelection. This proved to be a desperate misread of Biden’s abilities that delayed the inevitable—Democrats needing a new presidential candidate—for months down the road. The party would have been better off in the end if he had just fallen asleep on the dais. Instead, the delusion carried on.

The........

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